Ordeal by Innocence

TOMATOMETER

* By opting to have your review verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie. Your email address will solely be used for verifying the ticket.

* By opting to have your review verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie. Your email address will solely be used for verifying the ticket.

Share on Facebook

Movie Info

Based on the novel by Agatha Christie and set in the late 1950s, this unevenly told film starts when Dr. Arthur Calgary (Donald Sutherland) comes back to England after two years on an Antarctic expedition and discovers that the man he is searching for has been executed for murder. At the beginning of his expedition he had given a ride one night to a hitchhiker and accidentally ended up with his address book. To his horror, the hitchhiker's mother was killed on that night, and he had been the alibi that would have saved him from execution. Spurred on by his sense of shock and guilt, Calgary makes contact with the family and is put off by their disinterest in finding the real killer. It seems that the mother had many enemies among her close family members: her husband was having an affair, there was a blackmail scheme in the works, and many felt that she had already excluded them from any inheritance. Although the acting is uneven and the plot may seem predictable or contrived to non-Christie readers, the story retains interest, and Dave Brubeck's jazz score adds a special dimension to the proceedings.